Introducing “Fielder’s Choice 2”

In the sports card blogosphere, there are two distinct camps. There are the bloggers who use WordPress and the bloggers who use Blogger / Blogspot. I chose WordPress when I started this blog in June mostly because I thought that the WordPress blogs that I had read looked a little cleaner and more professional, and also because Wax Heaven was a WordPress blog.

Over time, I discovered that the reason why WordPress blogs look a little bit cleaner is because they’re far less customizable than Blogger / Blogspot blogs. This gives all of the WordPress blogs a consistent look and feel, but it has its drawbacks too. For example, I’d love to be able to change some of the colors around on this blog, but I can’t.

I’ve also discovered a couple of features in Blogger / Blogspot that I like. I love the idea of “followers” and I want to have followers of my own. I also like how the blog rolls are done, where you can see which blogs have been updated most recently and the title of their most recent posts.

So I decided that I want the best of both worlds. Yes, I want to have my cake and eat it too! I started a Blogger / Blogspot blog called Fielder’s Choice 2. I’m going to continue writing my blog posts on WordPress, and I’m just using the new blog to have followers and a blog roll that will allow me to see the most recently updated posts on other blogs. The new blog also features a blast from the past, the original Fielder’s Choice logo with Prince Fielder.

If you’ve always wanted to become a Fielder’s Choice “follower”, now you can with Fielder’s Choice 2. I’m looking forward to seeing all of the smiling faces on the follower list there. And I’ll be using the blog roll there to keep up with the posts on all of the other blogs. Now I won’t have to check Sports Cards Uncensored 50 times a day to see a list of the most recent posts in the card blogosphere!

I use netvibes as my feed reader. You can create ‘pages’ so I have one specifically for card blogs. At present, I have just over 50 different sports card blogs on that page. All I have to do is open the page, hit refresh, and I can see at a glance any new postings on all 50+ blogs. This makes it easy to check a large number of sites very easily.

One of these days I’ll try a feed reader, but for now, the Blogspot page works nicely. Chemgod – I used to use the RSS widget in WordPress, but it made my blog take forever to load, so I ditched it. Plus, with Blogspot, it puts the blogs in order starting with the one that was updated most recently. I like that a lot better.